Wallkill man pleads guilty to 2008 Middletown slaying

GOSHEN — A Town of Wallkill man took a guilty plea Thursday in Orange County Court that covers a homicide, two robberies and a plot to kill a witness against him.

Atiq Weston, 21, pleaded guilty to first-degree manslaughter in the April 30, 2008 stabbing death of Robert Kwiatkowski in the City of Middletown and for two May 2012 gunpoint robberies in the City of Middletown. He'll be sentenced in June to 15 years on each robbery, plus five years of post-release supervision on each, and 3-to-10 years on the manslaughter, all to run concurrent. Weston was 15 when he killed Kwiatkowski, and that sentence is the maximum he faced for the charge as a juvenile offender.

In court, Weston admitted that he was on Wickham Avenue in Middletown, heading toward home on Sheffield Drive when he bumped into Kwiatkowski, who was walking from work toward his home in the City. Under questioning by Assistant District Attorney Karen Edelman-Reyes, Weston said he and Kwiatkowski began arguing, voices raised. Weston pulled a silver pocket knife from his pants pocket and hit Kwiatkowski in the neck. Weston said he ran toward home, not looking to see if Kwiatkowski had been stabbed. He said he tossed the knife into the woods as he ran without looking at the blade.

Kwiatkowski left behind two children, Edelman-Reyes noted, “He was a good man, from all reports.”Weston also pleaded guilty to two May 2012 robberies. On May 21, 2012, Weston and a woman accomplice lured the 79-year-old victim to a quiet neighborhood in Middletown's Presidential Heights.

There, Weston admitted to beating and robbing the man, taking the victim's Dodge Neon and hitting him with the car. The victim suffered broken ribs and a broken jaw that required multiple surgeries. Weston wielded a .32-caliber pistol during the robbery.

Weston admitted that on May 6, 2012, he and the same woman accomplice approached a woman in a minivan on Rowan Street in Middletown and demanded money. When she refused, Weston hit her in the face with the butt of the .32-caliber pistol, breaking her nose and leaving her with scarring.

Orange County District Attorney David Hoovler took the unusual step of speaking during the plea proceeding. He explained that while the plea deal may seem lenient at first glance, the fact is that the homicide case had been “fundamentally flawed” through no fault of prosecutors or police, in part because of a claimed witness who perjured himself in 2011 before the grand jury.

Weston had been indicted in 2011 on a second-degree murder charge in the Kwiatkowski homicide, but prosecutors learned that the key witness who had testified before the grand jury had fabricated his claim to have witnessed the crime. Prosecutors withdrew that indictment, preserving their ability to present new charges should new evidence be found.

The decision to make the plea deal was a hard choice, Hoovler said, but after consulting with Kwiatkowski's family, the certainty of closure was found preferable to uncertainty, Edelman-Reyes told the court that Weston contacted prosecutors last week, offering to come clean and admit to killing Kwiatkowski, “thereby giving Mr. Kwiatkowski's family closure they would never otherwise have,” and to bring an end to a case that might otherwise never have been solved.